Janet Tyson, 2020

Researcher in Residence, 2020 

Janet Tyson is currently a PhD candidate in history at Birkbeck, University of London. In early 2020, she spent two weeks at Oak Spring working on her doctoral dissertation, which examines A Curious Herbal  - an encyclopedia of of medicinal plants illustrated by 18th century Scottish botanical artist Elizabeth Blackwell  - within the contexts of Georgian London and of similar books available at the time.     

Of her time at Oak Spring, Janet said, “This has been an invaluable experience. I've been exposed to an awful lot of things here instead of chasing all over the place. To be able to be a resident and to just walk over to the library everyday and look at these things, and the way it works I can just ask for something and Tony's just able to get it - other libraries you have to wait an hour. It's just very, very different.”

Read more about Janet’s research on our blog.    

Lindsay Wells, 2019

Stacy Lloyd Fellow, 2019

Lindsay Wells holds an M.A. in Art History from The Courtauld Institute of Art and is currently a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Art History at the University of Wisconsin Madison.  Her research focuses on environmental humanities and visual culture, and she used the Stacy Lloyd fellowship to research her doctoral dissertation, which explores how nineteenth-century houseplant horticulture influenced the botanical imagery of the British Aesthetic Movement.

 “My research as a Stacy Lloyd III Fellow will not only challenge our current understanding of botanical motifs in Victorian visual culture, but also foster critical exchanges between art history and the environmental humanities,” Lindsay said. “The Oak Spring Garden Library Collection contains hundreds of items of direct relevance to my project.” 

During her residency, Lindsay researched rare books, historical documents, and works of art from the Oak Spring Garden library collection about the history of indoor gardening. You can learn more about her here. 

Lucia Monge, 2018

Eliza Moore Fellow, 2018

Lucia Monge is a Peruvian artist who is currently based in Portland, Oregon. Her work focuses on how humans position themselves in the natural world and relate to other living beings, especially plants.  She has organized Plantón Móvil for the past ten years, a yearly “walking forest” performance that leads to the creation of public green areas.   

 During her residency at Oak Spring, Lucia explored the library collection and re-performed Charles Darwin's experiments on the movement of climbing plants. Lucia said she gained a great appreciation for the world of botanical illustration as a meeting place for artistic and scientific inquiry, and is grateful for everything Tony Willis and the staff at the library taught her.

Lucia returned to Oak Spring in  2019 in order to share what she learned from the Oak Spring Garden Library with our September 2019 Curated Artist in Residence. She continues to study climbing plants, and has created sculptures, textiles and a series of drawings based on her observations. 

To learn more about Lucia, click here.  To read our blogpost about one of Lucia’s recent projects, which involved sending 125 true potato seeds into space as part of an international art payload, click here. 

Ashley Boulden, 2018

Stacy Lloyd III Fellow, 2018

Ashley Boulden, the inaugural recipient of the 2018 Stacy Lloyd III Fellowship for Bibliographic Study, is a Ph.D. Candidate in Art and Architectural History at the University of Virginia’s McIntire Department of Art. Her dissertation focuses on engraved ornament prints that circulated in Paris during the eighteenth century, including the embroidery patterns of Charles Germain de Saint-Aubin. Her particular focus is the 258-page manuscript “Recueil de plantes” by Saint-Aubin housed in the Oak Spring Garden Library, which had not previously been digitized or widely researched.

Learn more about Ashley and her work here.